Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) data center and artificial-intelligence (AI) segment, which includes server CPUs, data center GPUs, and AI chips, suffered a 15% year over year decline in revenue during the second quarter. The good news is that this decline is an improvement over the first quarter, when the segment booked a 39% decline. The bad news is that a comeback is going to take time.

Unlike in the PC CPU market, where Intel has largely regained the performance crown from rival Advanced Micro Devices, the company is in much worse shape in the data center CPU market. Sapphire Rapids, an innovative line of data center CPUs from Intel that feature specialized accelerators for various workloads, was chronically delayed. Sapphire Rapids finally launched early this year, and the company is on the cusp of selling its 1 millionth chip. But those delays opened the door for AMD to make huge gains.

AMD's Genoa family of data center CPUs launched a few months before Sapphire Rapids, gaining AMD a massive advantage in terms of core density. Tom's Hardware called these chips a "server slam dunk." For any workload that benefits from massive parallelizability, AMD's Genoa is the clear choice, even with Sapphire Rapids now available.

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Source Fool.com